Who Leased the Most Data Center Space in 2015?

A lot of wholesale data center capacity was gobbled up last year and the bulk of it was leased by cloud providers and companies providing other popular web services.

Jim Kerrigan, managing principal at North American Data Centers, a data center-focused commercial real estate firm, said wholesale data center providers did a lot more business with cloud companies than they did in 2014. Cloud, he said, was one of the things responsible for 2015 being one of the best data center leasing years ever.

“I was surprised how much cloud has done last year,” he said. “Forty percent of those deals are cloud-based companies.”

Microsoft alone signed leases for nearly 30MW of capacity across three sites, according to Kerrigan’s latest annual report on the state of the North American data center real estate market. CenturyLink may be thinking of divesting some or all of the data center assets it owns, but the company took down 17MW of capacity across two sites last year.

Amazon Web Services contracted with CoreSite for a massive 130,000-square-foot Silicon Valley data center, according to the report. The report lifted mystery about who was the single tenant CoreSite said it was building the big dedicated data center in Santa Clara for. AWS also reportedly signed a smaller, 2MW deal in Montreal with Colo-D, likely to be one of the sites supporting its upcoming cloud region in Canada announced this week.

Apple leased a total of 12MW with DuPont Fabros Technology across two sites.

A new big data center user has emerged in 2015. Ride-sharing pioneer Uber leased 14MW of data center capacity total in Dallas, Santa Clara, and Ashburn, Virginia, according to the report. Uber’s massive data center expansion speaks to the demand the company is seeing and its ambitions to add services beyond the core ride-hailing one.